an insider's perspective, technical tips n' tricks in the era of the IT Revolution

June 25, 2013

Virtualized SAP and SAP HANA–share your story…

[UPDATED June 25th, 3:37pm ET with some additional pieces of info]

A couple of weeks back, we had a series of “SAP Summits” on the east coast and west coast. Was great to see and get feedback from many customers all at once. I think that they dug being able to talk to each other directly too – no vendor in the way.

While IT practitioners focus on their part of the stack (or perhaps are evolving into more horizontal “cloud architect” roles), it’s important to realize that SAP and/or Oracle apps are the beating heart of most enterprises.

That’s why things like these matter:

HANA moving toward a more open hardware model known as “Tailored Datacenter Integration” or “TDI” – though I prefer the “Open HANA” term. FYI, right now, HANA uses a relatively tight appliance model only – not a BAD thing – appliance accelerates time to value, just like the “Vblock vs. mix & match/reference architecture debate. You can find more on that here.

[UPDATE – June 25, 3:37pm ET – someone pointed out that this is not a good list. Check out this post for more – including the two that SAP offers themselves: SAP HANA Cloud Application Services – Ready-to-use application services on a HANA cloud with consumption based charge, and SAP HEC (HANA Enterprise Cloud) - Any HANA based applications including production, basically HANA PaaS (Platform as a Service), Enterprise support, and SAP customer source data integration. Also, if you are using CSC, Atos/Canopy, SunGard, Secure24, KIO or other service providers, ask them if they offer SAP cloud offerings – those listed do)]

Looking at us (aka EMC) as a customer – we’re rebuilding our core app stack inside EMC and shifting to the SAP app stack from custom oracle apps. This is multi-year project, and touches almost everything our customers and partners interact with. It’s complex, and the project meetings make me want to poke my eyeballs out :-) As you can imagine, it’s a huge “hundreds of millions of dollars” + “must succeed” kind of enterprise app project.

I get why in various projects like these, people debate “to virtualize or not” – and in fact one of the customers in our forum asked me that question. I answered (I’m a little passionate on the topic), but then even better, a pile of their fellow customers in the room jumped in and shared their experiences.

It seems like even Oracle is slowly (ever so slowly!) budging on their support of different ways of using their software for customers (Hyper-V and Azure joining AWS here). Yet – when I talk to enterprises, many of them STILL are very “old school” in their deployment models (whether it’s on prem or in a public cloud provider – BTW – some very interesting dialog from an end-user on the economics of private/public here – most interesting dialog is in the comments, Nate is a madman – in an interesting way :-)

So all that got a few of us thinking… We have great examples (Columbia Sportwear is one of my favorites – check this out) Let’s get more customers to share their stories of virtualized, cloud deployments of these mission critical applications based on SAP – it’s always best from a customer, not from a vendor.

You can find out how to participate here, and share with the #SAPonEMC – I want to hear your story, and see you on Chad’s World :-)

Comments

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Hi Chad,

Inspired to speak out about SAP, and Specifically SAP HANA. SAP HANA is one of the most disruptive technologies that has been released in the past couple years with customers and partners embarking on prototyping new solutions that will enable organisations to have access to timely access to accurate data and NOT just SAP data!

I am working on a large proof of concepts with one of EMC’s advisory alliance partners, to provide consistence, accurate and timely access to information for financial services. This solution is expect to show case the ability to analyse 10’s of billions of rows of data coming into solution from batch feeds and realtime injection of transactions from other sources. The data will be modelled and present to the end users using a sophisticated visualisation tool, to allow users to drill down into the data.

The POC is about to commence at our Solution Centre in Cork, the solution is based on VCE’s converged HANA appliance and Vblock 320 architecture for supporting application services.

This solution also included EMC Networker and DataDomain for solution resiliency and data protection, also our SRM and Watch4Net is being used to supporting the management and monitoring of the infrastructure solutions. Further investigation is happening to look at continuous availability, data archiving and security.

If you want to hear more about what we are doing happy to setup an internal webex! – “Confidential Project” – expected launch end of Q3!!

As I stated before, HANA is a disruptive technology in the market today, the key is finding a right use case!
Mike

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The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by Dell Technologies and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Dell Technologies or any part of Dell Technologies. This is my blog, it is not an Dell Technologies blog.